Latest Posts - Page 90 of 194

May 13, 2020May 5, 2020 Mastering Your Career

Surge Effort and Just In Time Work

The steady effort we put in to become a better developer can be redirected when needed. This surge effort can provide us the extra steam we need to get a project done. Likewise, it can provide a steady flow of effort that allows us to avoid the usual ebb and flow of IT work. All of that can lead to less exhaustion, more productivity, and a generally better mood. Happy and healthy are traits most of us prefer to have. The Surge Effort There are horror stories about the “pointy-haired boss” that decides to cancel vacations, weekends, and even going home to hit a deadline. While these are sometimes a reality, it is more common to be asked to work... Read more

May 12, 2020February 21, 2020 Integrate Testing Into Your Development Flow Testing

Selenium In TestNG: Taking Your Web Tests To The Next Level

Welcome to the next episode in our new series “Integrating testing into your development flow”. Today we are going to be looking at “Selenium In TestNG: Taking Your Web Tests To The Next Level “. In our last presentation, we went over how to expand on the logging and reporting tools provided by testNG to generate more meaningful reports. In addition, we covered several examples on how to write your own custom logger and reporters. So that you can create your own custom HTML and XML reports that make sense to the end-user. Today we’re going to take our tests to the next level by looking at using Selenium in TestNG. Specifically, how Selenium in TesgNG can be used to... Read more

May 11, 2020May 5, 2020 Mastering Your Career

Giving Back And Building a Brand

We have often looked at ways to provide content as part of a side-hustle. Thus, we will skip that topic this time around. Instead, let’s look at giving back and providing things for free. However, before you move to the next article, we will focus on how free to others does not mean it lacks value for you. We might even see situations where an altruistic approach is very beneficial to us and our brand. Start With Giving Back Before we look at the benefit of this type of action, we should focus on what we are doing. The goal for tasks like we discuss in this episode is to share our experience with others. This process is how we... Read more

May 8, 2020April 26, 2020 Mastering Your Career

Mastering Skills In Under Ten Thousand Hours

There is a well-known book that describes mastery of skills as needing ten thousand hours. The ideas put forth in the book have many arguments for and against, but that is for another time. In this episode, we look at ways for mastering skills in under the ten thousand hours mentioned in the Outliers book. This theory is critical for our daily exercises in getting better because we do want to reach mastery at some point. Complementary Skills We can assume that there is some amount of hours typically needed to master a skill. Likewise, many skills are related in ways that allow us to learn multiple skills in less time. The whole hours required are less than the sum... Read more

May 6, 2020April 26, 2020 Mastering Your Career

Mixing Side-hustle Tasks With Your Daily Job – Overlap Benefits

Time is arguably our most valuable resource. We can not buy extra time. We can only spend it as wisely as possible. That means we need to be mindful of the cost of our daily tasks for getting better. Fortunately, that time is not a loss. We can plan out our daily steps to improve in ways that allow us to get more done with little or no additional time spent. One way is mixing side-hustle tasks with your regular job. Killing Two Birds with One Stone We have examined how our side-hustle work and a daily job can overlap. Those tasks we do to improve may help our career while our day job can provide some experience that translates... Read more

May 4, 2020April 25, 2020 Mastering Your Career

Prior Work As a Starting Point For Higher Quality

Our daily work to get better is not without positive side-effects. One of the most powerful of these is the ability for us to build on prior work. These tools can be a huge productivity boost. That is the case whether we are starting with an application baseline or working from a document template. Prior Work Is An Investment Our daily steps to improve and become a better developer will generate deliverables at some point. These may not be highly polished production items we would send to a customer. Nevertheless, they are a start on that type of work. Therefore, our daily work on improving can also be seen as an investment in some yet-to-be-determined future projects. There is no... Read more